Interlude I : The Historian’s Fragment

The following is translated from the Seventh Archive of Aegis. The scribe’s name is lost, the ink stained with fire and water damage. It is widely accepted to be one of the clearest surviving accounts of the Ald War.

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“I am M’bara Kithule, scholar of the Southern Mountains of Africa, serving under King Oba Daran of the High Plateau, allied with the United States of America.

I was sent forth with a company of A-ranked adventurers—men and women honed in blade, spell, and courage—to chart the dark forest that gnaws at our border.

All are dead.

Their bones feed the roots around me even as I write. I sit bleeding. My ink is blackened with my own blood. By dawn I will be carrion.

The page blurs. My hands shake. I cannot hold the quill steady, but I must. Someone must read this.

Before I fall, I leave this fragment. Let it reach every nation that yet lives, and above all let it reach the Astral Dominion of Te. I have written to them many times, warning, pleading, and yet no answer has come. They strut with the strongest armies, the keenest towers, the brightest mages in this shattered world. If any are fit to challenge what festers in these woods, it is them.

Let them come. For if they do not, the dark that killed us will crawl from these trees into the heartlands.

And let them not forget: this darkness was born of the Ald War.

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“There are many wars. But ask any man, in any country, and he will answer the same when you say the War:

The Ald War.

The war that unmade the world.

The war of wars.

It began as all great conflicts do—quietly, with pride and engines and signatures of ink on paper.

It ended with physics itself in chains.

I was a boy when the electrons began to die. First the lights dimmed. Then the planes fell out of the sky like swatted flies. One could hear the thunder of their descent for hours. We thought it was sabotage, or weather. Only later did we understand: the very particles that carried our progress were slipping into stillness.

Machines that ruled cities crumbled into silence. Cars remained, but not the factories that built them. Telephones screamed with static, then hushed forever. Hospitals bled patients by the thousands—not for lack of medicine, but because the drugs themselves no longer worked as intended. Chemistry was rewritten. Biology followed. Each law bent. Each cure mocked. A cut from one blade lingered for weeks, while another healed in hours.

And monsters—yes, we had monsters before the Ald War. The wild things of mountain and swamp, the crawling horrors of the seas. But the War gave them mind. A mutation the survivors call the Wildstrand flickered to life in their blood. Some beasts grew cunning. Others developed strange quirks, unpredictable as dice thrown in the dark. One breathed flame only when frightened. Another mimicked human voices—always the voices of the dead. Entire kingdoms fell not to armies, but to their own forests turned traitor.

And it was not only beasts. Some whispered it touched us, too. I saw men whose shadows moved before their bodies did. A woman who wept fire instead of tears. Whole towns vanished, their inhabitants… changed. I dare not put the rest to page.”

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We scholars are left not with certainty, but with fragments. We can measure mana, but not why it surges where electrons wither. We can map the new chemistries, but not predict them. Every experiment must be repeated ten times, and even then the results mock us.

The Ald War was not merely a conflict of nations. It was a betrayal of the universe itself. We broke the contract of creation. And creation, in turn, broke us.

If these words reach you—heed the forest. Heed the cracks in the laws of life. Do not send more children to die as I have.

The war is not over.

It only—

[the line trails into a smear of ink, followed by drops of darker red across the parchment. In the margin, pressed faintly into the soaked fibers, are fingerprints as if the scribe clutched the page before collapsing. The fragment ends here.]